Navigating the Digital Product Passport Landscape: From Implementation Challenges to Future Opportunities

Abstract

Digital Product Passports are a central instrument for enabling a digitized circular economy. They provide transparency over processes and life cycles. Almost every sector must deal with them as they become mandatory in the following years. Yet, they are still in their infancy. Much theoretical-conceptual work emerges while consolidating research, but it is still missing. We tackle this gap with a review of Digital Product Passports. We could identify eleven often-used technologies for data collection, curation, and sharing with the passports. Furthermore, we present several challenges clustered into nine categories ranging from conceptual challenges via the architecture to the operation and ecosystem aspects. Moreover, we close our study with six paths for future research